Los Angeles–based mostly artist Alison Saar has been named the 2025 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize, awarded yearly by the Excessive Museum of Artwork in Atlanta. The prize honors Saar’s contributions to African American artwork and coincides with the award’s twentieth anniversary. Saar can be honored on the annual Driskell Gala on September twentieth in Atlanta.
Established in 2005, the Driskell Prize alternates every year between honoring an artist and an artwork historian. It carries a $50,000 unrestricted money award—doubled from $25,000 in 2020—to assist the recipient’s observe. Previous winners have included Rashid Johnson in 2012, Mark Bradford in 2016, Amy Sherald in 2018, and Ebony G. Patterson in 2023. Randall Suffolk, director of the Excessive Museum, famous that it was becoming to award the prize to Saar on its twentieth anniversary as a result of her work “exemplifies what the award has come to indicate.”
“I got here to honor David Driskell not solely as an excellent historian and artist, but in addition as an expensive good friend,” Saar stated in a press assertion. “I’m particularly grateful to obtain this award from the Excessive Museum, which, in 1993, commissioned me to create the exhibition ‘Fertile Floor.’ That exhibition was one among my first solo museum exhibits and later toured many museums throughout the US.”
Born to artist Betye Saar in Los Angeles in 1956, the youthful Saar continues to stay and work within the metropolis. Her sculptures and installations typically discover the African diaspora and Black ladies’s id, drawing affect from African, Caribbean, and American traditions. Amongst her most acknowledged public artworks is Swing Low, a memorial to Harriet Tubman in South Harlem that in 2008 grew to become New York’s first public monument to an African American girl.
“Receiving this prize permits me to proceed creating works that confront the dehumanizing historical past of enslaved African Individuals and spotlight how the legacy of these injustices continues to have an effect on Black communities at the moment,” Saar stated. “It offers me the liberty to make artwork that speaks to our painful previous, celebrates our energy and wonder within the current, and envisions a strong and wonderful future.”
Saar’s work is held within the everlasting collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Backyard, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the Museum of Trendy Artwork, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Artwork.
